In an age of great technological achievement, many of humanity’s most basic, universal questions remain unanswered: how did the solar system come to be? How did the universe come to exist? And, perhaps most relevant to us as a species—how did life itself begin, and why on did this occur on Earth?
The transition from non-life to life has never been observed under experimental conditions; while scientists have many theories on what unique alignments gave rise to life on Earth, no definitive process has been identified. Some microorganisms thrive in extreme environments, and it’s believed that life might have begun with such organisms.
Other popular theories posit that life was seeded on Earth from organic molecules found in certain clay minerals (the “clay theory”), or in comets and asteroids that impacted Earth’s surface as meteorites. Some of these theories, like the clay theory, suggest that life could have been seeded elsewhere, too. If a life-bearing meteorite impacted Earth, seeding this planet with the most basic elements of life, it’s also possible similar meteorites may have landed on other worlds and brought life there as well.
With the growing number of rockets headed spaceward, and with plans to establish a permanent human presence on the Moon, we can expect to learn more about how a phenomenon such as life came to pass. Perhaps, decades in the future, we’ll look back on this time of ignorance with incredulous nostalgia.
Planned human activity in space and on the surface of the Moon—and eventually Mars—have spurred discussions of ethics and of preserving human heritage and history in space, specifically the Apollo landing sites. Postdoctoral researcher Justin Holcomb said in a 2023 statement that “The material record that currently exists on the Moon is rapidly becoming at risk of being destroyed if proper attention isn’t paid during the new space era.” The same thinking could be applied to spacecraft, data from rovers, and experiments. We have already lost a lot of records from the early Space Race, and some would like to preserve them forever—on Earth and beyond.”
A company called LifeShip is working to make sure that everything we know about life and our story as humans is safeguarded for the humans of the future. “[LifeShip] is a message to a future civilization—it’s like a message in a bottle to send out to other worlds. It’s humanity; an archive and a blueprint,” says Ben Haldeman of the company he started to preserve the story of life on Earth to send out to space. “The vision is that LifeShip will eventually turn into seeds that will ripple out and continue life in the solar system, and beyond.”
Image credit: LifeShipHaldeman’s journey into space started at the University of California at Berkeley where he designed instruments to look for life on Mars as a mechanical engineering graduate student. “That was my first real project working on space stuff,” he remembers with a smile. I interviewed Haldeman after winning the 2023 Martine Rothblatt Space Settlement in Our Lifetime business plan competition. Dr. Rothblatt has been a pioneer in satellite communications and is the CEO of United Therapeutics, a company that strives to prolong human life by providing organ replacement, which will not only save countless lives, but will also be pivotal to sustaining human life in space.
Haldeman’s work at UC Berkeley focused on looking for amino acids in Martian soil with a tiny microfluidic chip with lasers built around it. This project sparked Haldeman’s interest in the origins of life and whether it existed elsewhere, like on Mars. Haldeman went on to work for another company building massive telescopes that would scour space for new planets and collect data on them.
Haldeman then joined Planet Labs (now called simply “Planet”) early in the company’s history and designed satellites and cameras that were later launched into space. “That experience really helped frame this concept of ‘space to help Earth’ and ‘space to help life,’” Haldeman said. Working with Planet, Haldeman also gained valuable insight into how to create hardware that could be sent to space aboard rockets, where mass, size, and storage is limited and expensive.
After his departure from Planet, Haldeman had a number of encounters around the world, culminating in a trip to an ecovillage in Guatemala. “I was sitting under this giant tree, surrounded by ferns and moss and mushrooms; a whole ecosystem—and I saw life evolving out of the ocean and up on land and into the air, and realized that Earth is ready to reproduce.”
Currently, the company sells a DNA kit that can be purchased for $99—it consists of a saliva collection swab for DNA preservation and prepaid return shipping to LifeShip. DNA is extracted and then preserved in synthetic amber before it’s added to a capsule that includes a “biobank” with DNA from plant and animal species. “We use a lab in Berkeley to extract the DNA out of the cells [on the cheek swab] and then preserve it on a fibrous membrane made for long-term DNA storage,” Haldeman explains. “That is in turn preserved in a synthetic amber polymer, kind of like in Jurassic Park.”
In the movie, scientists extract dinosaur DNA from ancient mosquitos entombed in amber and then used that DNA to clone the dinosaurs and bring them back from extinction—that’s not quite Haldeman’s goal. The synthetic amber is designed to last a billion years, “which is pretty cool,” laughs Haldeman.
LifeShip has already been flown on four successful launches; their first mission, which took off in 2022 aboard SpaceX’s Crew Dragon, was a partnership with NASA to the International Space Station and contained the DNA of over a 1,000 people. Their second launch, also to the ISS on a SpaceX Crew Dragon, contained a capsule with DNA from another 1,000 people and 500 species of plants, representing six continents and 100 of Earth’s most common food crops.
The third launch, which occurred in late 2023 aboard Astrobotic’s lunar lander Peregrine, was enroute to the Moon as part of the Arch Mission Lunar Library II; the Arch Mission Foundation is a nonprofit that works with LifeShip to create an archive of humanity’s heritage and most important knowledge, and to disseminate that information off-Earth. Unfortunately, the Peregrine lander suffered a propellant leak after launch and never landed on the Moon.
The fourth and latest launch occurred in Mark of 2025 aboard Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost and landed the first ever “Pyramid on the Moon.” The small, palm-sized golden pyramid is actually a capsule; not only is it the first human-made pyramid on another celestial body, it contains information vital to our story as human beings. The capsule includes plant seeds from 100 key species; plant DNA; the complete human genome etched into Cerabyte ceramic; art and messages from 100,000 people etched into NanoFiche; all of Wikipedia; sacred waters from 33 sites worldwide; and the code for Gaia AI.
A byproduct of Haldeman’s work with LifeShip is that the company is getting very good at storing vast amounts of data in a variety of ways—all of them requiring minuscule amounts of space and intended to be as close to immortal as possible. Framing the synthetic amber containing the preserved genetic material are layers containing data.
Image credit: LifeShipSynthetic DNA is an important part of LifeShip’s model, allowing information to be stored in the form of artificially created DNA sequences that are synthesized by assembling nucleotides in a specific order. Binary data, 0s and 1s, are encoded as sequences of nucleotides (A, T, C, and G). Potentially, one gram of DNA could store petabytes of data.
Additionally, synthetic DNA is stable under the correct conditions and could preserve information for thousands of years—or billions, Haldeman estimates. Eventually, Haldeman hopes that LifeShip will expand and become a cohesive archival platform that business can use to create a “billion-year backup” of their data across space and time.
Companies like Cerabyte, which develops long-term data storage technology using ceramic nano-storage, shares LifeShip’s vision and aims to preserve the personal memories of billions of users. NanoFiche also produces high-density analog archival technology by etching data onto a durable medium using a nanoscale lithography process.
LifeShip’s next mission, slated for December 2025, will put a “Luna Pyramid,” which contains various art pieces, plant seeds, a copy of the human genome, and the DNA of 500 species, aboard Astrolabe’s FLIP rover. Looking forward to 2026, LifeShip aims to send a pyramid archive to deep space aboard AstroForge’s DeepSpace-2 mission.
